Internal Vertigo - Depersonalisation

I was sitting in the smoke room at my local mental health support project. I don’t smoke, but it’s got this comfy sofa and a kettle so it’s the ideal place for meeting my keyworker when I’m in the office. It’s informal and has a warm friendly feel to it. Usually I feel completely at home there. Usually I’m sitting back on the sofa, with one leg under me, chatting away about my latest exploits or anything else that’s on my mind. Sometimes my hands grip onto the promise of caffeine like it’s my saviour, although this is usually when I’m there at a hideously early meeting. My hands shake though lack of sleep, and the warmth of the coffee provides me with a sense of calm. It’s regular stuff, nothing unusual. It’s just the kind of things that make it feel like a very safe and predictable place.

Today, though, things felt anything but safe and anything but predictable. I’d been chatting to my keyworker for about an hour. It was pretty hefty stuff – my worries about my medication, about feeling overwhelmed, about my difficulties getting support from the services (and more importantly how that makes me feel), about some of the things I experienced last time I changed my meds (the complete loss of control as the psychosis swamped me). It’s stuff I rarely think about, let alone talk about.

The past 6 months I’ve been really removed from all the crap in my head – I think it’s my brain’s way of giving me a break. Some kind of well meant self-protection. It means that I often can’t remember what happened yesterday, last week, last month (or at least how I was feeling and what I was doing – I can remember really intricate details about some stuff that other people don’t even notice). I think my memories are pretty disjointed, and am always in the position where my keyworkers will say ‘how are you compared to last week’ and I honestly can’t remember if I saw them or not, let alone where we were and what was happening. I think they’re getting used to this now, and it doesn’t usually worry me ‘cause I never think to think about it.

Today, though, I’d had a tough time and hadn’t slept too well. Somehow talking to my keyworker opened up lots of things I hadn’t realised that I’d been thinking about. Somehow it bypassed my usual unconscious defences, and I was right in the middle of it. It was kinda disconcerting because I hadn’t even realised that any of these worries were there. I’m comfortable with him, though, so I just went with it. It all poured out, and I began to feel a bit peculiar. Perhaps it was emotional bleeding – I mean, if you cut yourself and lose a lot of blood you start to feel faint. Is it a similar thing when it’s your emotional life blood that flows out unchallenged? When your mind forgets that it needs to clot? It certainly felt that way to me, now I think about it.

Suddenly, as I was speaking to him I felt as if I was being lifted off the floor (or at least as if my mind was). My awareness felt like it was moving up and away from my body, and that it was expanding to fill up the room. I was moving up and backwards, so that I felt so high I became dizzy and frightened. The only thing that was stopping me was the ceiling, and I felt my mind was barely contained by it. I felt removed from things, distant, so that I was barely there at all.

I have a terrible fear of heights, and this feeling of my mind being expanded up to the ceiling was so real that this phobia kicked in. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff looking down. I felt sick and panicky, I felt I was going to faint. Can you get vertigo from your own brain’s internal height? I’m not sure if it is technically possible, but that’s sure how it felt.

I tried to focus on my breathing, trying to slow it down and calm the panic that was beginning to take hold. I held onto the sofa to try and tether myself and resolved to wait it out. My keyworker tried to be reassuring, and chatted a bit to me. I tried to focus on his voice. I knew that if I could re-attach myself to the world my mind would probably put itself back inside my head. I guess that’s the benefit of having these kind of things happen a number of times – you keep a rational part of you which says ‘ok, we’ve been here before. It’s alright. You are in your body and you are in this room. Just sit tight and try to keep calm. It’ll work out. Chill’.

Sure enough my mind came back down to earth (literally), although I was left feeling disorientated for the rest of the day. I tried to meet my boyfriend for a drink, but I had to use so much of my mind to keep myself together that I ended up going to the wrong place and getting lost. That’s when mobile phones become more than just a luxury. I was so glad to see him when we finally met up – I almost cried with relief. He grounds me, and I felt safe again. Multiple cups of tea later I began to feel human again, and laughed at how weird things were only a few hours ago. I felt really embarrassed, but I’m lucky in that he gets this kind of thing too (or more exactly he gets the opposite – when the world shifts in his perception instead of his own mind).

Through the internet and talking to other people I’ve worked out that this is a form of ‘depersonalisation’. When you feel unreal in some way, or cut off from your surroundings. They think that it’s related to anxiety (or at least that many people with anxiety disorders also get this kind of feeling), although I don’t think that’s the whole story. Apparently it’s really common, and can be related to traumatic life experiences (something I can definitely relate to). I think of it as a way of coping that was useful once, but that isn’t so useful now there’s nothing to run away from. I imagine that there are 1000s of reasons people get it, and each one is individual to that … err … individual (and the gold award for obviousness goes too …. Rachel Waddingham!). Jon (my friend) gets ‘derealisation’ (the opposite), and I know some people that get both.

There's a definite lack of information around on how to cope with it though - and I'm definitely still working on that side of the equation. Wish me luck

Rachel Waddingham © 2004